


kaleidoscopes

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Light Pining, New Year's Day, Pre-Relationship, Riverdale Writing Challenge, canon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 15:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17327606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: "Happy New Year!”He turns to see Betty skipping down the front walk of her house, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, despite the late night. Her hair is in its usual neat ponytail, her mouth turned up in a wide smile.Jughead wishes desperately that he’d at least thought to look in a mirror before heading outside.





	kaleidoscopes

Jughead wakes on New Year’s Day with a beam of sunshine in his eyes, light streaming through the Andrews’ living room windows.

He squints and shifts on to his back, mouth stretching open in a yawn. It takes a few moments for him to register the sound that must have woken him up: Vegas, Archie’s yellow lab, scratching at the front door.

“Alright, just give me a minute, bud,” he mutters, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he swings his feet onto the floor. It’s sticky – enough that he can feel the bottoms of his socks catching against the floorboards with each step, a fact he notes with mild disgust.

He’ll help pick up the stray cans and bottles and other post-party detritus littering the house, once he’s got some coffee in his system. He always does. But Archie can handle the mopping himself.

After retrieving his coat from the back of a kitchen chair, and his beanie from where it’s squished between the couch cushions, Jughead clips Vegas’ leash to his collar and opens the door, stumbling slightly over the front step as the dog bounds eagerly for the sidewalk.

He yawns again while Vegas does his business on the grass, the cold air making his lungs ache. It seems early yet – the morning light still has that hazy quality to it that doesn’t usually clear up until late morning during this time of year. Given that the party had raged on until just after 2 am, Jughead guesses he’s probably operating on no more than five hours of sleep.

He’s _definitely_ going to need that coffee.

The sound of a door opening and closing somewhere nearby pulls him out of his clumsy attempts at mental math. “Happy New Year!”

He turns to see Betty skipping down the front walk of her house, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, despite the late night. Her hair is in its usual neat ponytail, her mouth turned up in a wide smile. Jughead wishes desperately that he’d at least thought to look in a mirror before heading outside.

“Happy New Year,” he echoes. “Why are you up so early?”

Betty shrugs, bending down to pat Vegas on the head. “I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. Figured I may as well get an early start on our annual tradition.”

By _annual tradition_ , he knows she means _cleaning up the ample evidence of underage drinking so Archie’s parents don’t freak out when they get home._ As Archie’s best friends, such has been their solemn duty for three years running.

“Is Archie up yet?” Betty asks, turning her gaze to his second-story window. The curtains are drawn – with good reason, Jughead suspects.

He scoffs. “I doubt it.”

“You didn’t wake him?”

It’s a reasonable question, likely made with the equally reasonable assumption that Jughead had spent the night on an air mattress on Archie’s bedroom floor, as was also their longstanding tradition. This year, though, there was an entirely new factor to consider:

Veronica.

Jughead fiddles with the leash in his hands. It shouldn’t come as a _surprise_ that Veronica had spent the night in Archie’s room. While they hadn’t engaged in any full-on PDA during the party, something had clearly been brewing between them in the three months since the heiress had moved with her family to Riverdale, and Jughead had spied them sharing a chaste kiss at midnight.

(He’d also seen Betty peck Ethel Muggs on the cheek when the ball dropped, a sight that had – ridiculously, he’ll admit – sent a little flare of jealousy buzzing through his chest.)

So no, Betty shouldn’t be surprised. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be upset. Her own short-lived attempt at sparking a romance with Archie had fizzled out over the summer, about two months before the Lodge’s numerous moving trucks showed up outside the Pembrooke building downtown. Neither Archie nor Betty had been willing to say much to Jughead about it, and after a few weeks of mutual avoidance, they had more or less settled back into their best-friends-since-birth rhythm, much to Jughead’s relief.

Yet he couldn’t shake the suspicion that Betty was still harboring _some_ kind of lingering feelings for the boy next door. Why else would she spend long afternoons in the office of the Blue and Gold, or always choose to sit on Jughead’s side of the booth at Pop’s, or join him in the projector booth at the Twilight instead of hanging out with their friends in the back of Archie’s truck, if not to avoid more painful, awkward encounters with the boy who broke her heart?

“I actually slept on the couch this time,” he says, hoping she’ll take the hint without further elaboration.

Betty’s eyes widen slightly. “Oh. Veronica?”

Jughead nods.

“That couch is so uncomfortable! You should’ve told me.”

He frowns, tugging at Vegas’ leash when the dog starts snuffling at what _might_ be a dead squirrel. “Why?”

Betty’s cheeks turn even pinker than they already were in the cold morning air. “Oh, well…you could’ve come and stayed with me, if you wanted.”

Jughead considers the now-irrelevant offer; the Coopers’ sofa _is_ bigger and plushier than the Andrews’. They have more throw pillows to choose from, too.

Of course, Betty’s house also comes with the considerable downside that Betty’s parents are usually inside of it.

Still – not a bad idea. “Good point. Save me a spot on the couch for next year, in case this is still going on.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Archie’s window.

“The couch. Right,” Betty mumbles, ducking her head as she smooths her hands over her hair. “Um, it’s pretty cold out here, should we go inside?”

Jughead leads the way, Vegas trotting after him eagerly, Betty taking up the rear. As he walks through the front door, he’s struck by the entirely unexpected scent of coffee already wafting in from the kitchen.

Veronica peers around the doorway, looking remarkably polished for someone who just spent the night in a bed not her own – with Archie Andrews, no less, who moves so much in his sleep he routinely kicks the entire comforter off of the bed before daybreak.

“Próspero Año Nuevo! The coffee just finished brewing, and my driver Smithers should be here any minute with fresh croissants.” She pronounces the word like there’s a _w_ somewhere in it, which Jughead normally hates, but the early morning pretension is outweighed by the fact that she’s currently walking towards him with a steaming cup of coffee in her outstretched, well-manicured hands.

He catches himself at the last moment and steps aside, gesturing to Betty. “Ladies first.”

“Thank you, Veronica.” Betty smiles. “Did you have fun at the party?”

Jughead pours himself a mug of coffee, zoning out as the girls chatter. He slumps back in one of the chairs at the kitchen table and closes his eyes, only opening them again a few minutes later when someone kicks lightly at his calf.

“Huh?”

“I asked you if you kissed anyone at midnight.” Veronica threads her fingers together beneath her chin, looking at him expectantly from across the table. Betty sits beside her, meeting his gaze for only a second before her eyes shift focus to something over his shoulder. Her cheeks are still red, he notices, though they’ve been back indoors plenty long enough to readjust to the warmth.

“Nope. Not me.” Unsure of what else to say – there’s not much to elaborate on when it comes to the mostly-nonexistent romantic history of Jughead Jones – he takes a long sip of his coffee.

“That’s funny, neither did Betty here.”

“Yeah, she did,” Jughead says without thinking.

It’s not until he sees Betty’s very visible, very confused reaction that he realizes what he just said. His head feels impossibly hot, like someone’s just lit a furnace somewhere in the back of his throat.

“I thought I saw you with Ethel,” he adds lamely.

Betty looks at him like she thinks he’s insane. Which she probably does, because now she knows he was watching her during the party, and – ugh.

“As friends,” she says. “It wasn’t a _kiss_ kiss.”

Veronica exchanges an inscrutable look with Betty, and then slaps her hands lightly on the tabletop, standing up from her seat. “Well, I’m going to go wake up that lazybones Archie now. If someone rings the doorbell, it’s Smithers with our breakfast.”

Silence falls over them as Veronica sashays from the room. Jughead isn’t sure what would be worse: openly acknowledging that he just made things weird, or ignoring it altogether. Thankfully, Betty doesn’t give him a choice.

She gulps down the rest of her coffee and then stands up, placing her hands on her hips as she surveys the room. “So, I guess we should get started.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jughead pushes his seat back from the table. “But let’s be slow about it, so Archie doesn’t conveniently sleep through two-thirds of the cleanup again this year.”

The pastries have been delivered, and the kitchen mostly cleared, by the time Archie shuffles downstairs twenty minutes later, after what Jughead can only assume was a very persuasive wakeup call courtesy of Veronica. “Hey guys,” he croaks, fumbling for the coffee pot, eyes still half-shut. “Thanks so much for helping.”

“No problem, Arch.” Betty waves a half-eaten croissant in the air. “We’re lucky to have Veronica’s help this year, too.”

Veronica beams in response, though Jughead would be more inclined to praise her contributions if any of them had involved the actual cleaning process.

The new girl does ultimately pitch in, however, as does Archie, whose inability to stop bumping into stationary objects all morning provides enough entertainment that the next two hours fly by, all talk of midnight non-kisses forgotten.  

At least, Jughead assumes it’s been forgotten until he’s out on the sidewalk again with Betty, standing outside the gate to her front yard. He’s certainly not sad to be finished cleaning up Archie’s house, but there’s a little tug in his stomach at the thought of parting ways with Betty, even if they _are_ going to see each other at school the next day, and pretty much every day after that.

He rests a hand on one of the white picket fenceposts, giving her a tentative, lopsided smile. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” But Betty makes no moves to head inside; instead, she frowns down at her white sneakers, her arms curled around her middle almost protectively. “Juggie, did…did you really think there was something between Ethel and me last night?”

“No, no.” He touches her elbow in what he hopes is a reassuring way. “I know you’re not, like. Into Ethel.”

“Okay,” she says again, sounding relieved. “I thought maybe…” Betty hesitates, biting her lip. “Maybe that was why you weren’t…with me, at midnight.”

Jughead freezes. “Did you _want_ me to be?”

Betty looks up at him then, her wide green eyes betraying a hint of panic in the split-second before she rises up onto her toes and leans into him, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Her lips are a shock of warmth against his cold skin, and as she pulls away, Jughead feels a shift in the world around him, like a kaleidoscope clicking into a bright, beautiful new pattern – one he never would have imagined himself, but which feels like it’s existed all along, now that he’s finally seen it.

Betty stares at him for a moment, perhaps just as frozen by the realization as he is. “Better late than never,” she says, and then flashes him a nervous smile before whirling on her heel and hurrying up the stone path to her house.

Jughead watches her go, waiting until the door has shut behind her to begin his own walk home, fingers drifting every now and then to the spot on his cheek where she’d kissed him.

Better late than never, indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for prompt 1 of the Riverdale Writing Challenge. Whee!
> 
> I'll admit, I'm not 100% thrilled with how this turned out, but I'm tired of editing so I'm releasing it out into the world. They can't all be homeruns :)
> 
> Anyway I hope you enjoy! Come say hi on tumblr if you'd like, I'm at imreallyloveleee.


End file.
